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It goes out to more than 1,000 ambitious frontier people: bentoists, sociotechnical researchers, progress studiers, effective altruists, metamodernists, ~gameB players, crypto-anarchosyndicalists, social justice activists, VCs, doughnut economists, systems thinkers, and more.
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Hi friends! 👋
1) This week’s article is provocatively titled How to Live a Meaningful Life.
I’ve learned how to self-generate meaning in my own life. It’s been great! There’s meaning all around us—we just need to recognize and embrace it.
How?
First, we should understand meaning itself. Meaning is the process of applying our human symbols to the biological realities of life.
Second, a meaningful life comes from layering a “Clear Important Path” on top of our biological reality. A meaningful life feels like it’s going somewhere important.
Third, we should ask—what kinds of reality are good for layering on a Clear Important Path?
The best types of reality are ones that aren’t too random (like the digits of pi—3.14159…) but also not too clear (like .11111). We want a “Goldilocks” amount of complexity— something to continuously extract patterns from. A moderate amount of constant entropy.
I call these Antifragile Attractors, and they are things like gardening, meditation, having kids, etc.
So…yeah! That’s how to live a meaningful life—layer a (Symbolic) Clear Important Path on top of a (Real) Antifragile Attractor.
This is intimately connected to our meaning crisis, metamodernism, systems attractors, and Future Me meaning. Check out the full 6min article here.
2) We have 3 great folks confirmed for the 1st Roote Fellowship. (Hooray!) The cohort begins in two weeks (and there are only 7 spots left!), so please apply this week.
👉 Apply for the Roote Fellowship now 👈
LINKS
1) An amazing two-part podcast (1, 2) where Jim Rutt interviews Tyson Yunkaporta, an indigenous Australian who wrote Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. I love this because it shows how indigenous knowledge is intimately tied with systems thinking and visual processing. Really good stuff.
2) The Haber Process (which creates nitrogen fertilizer) uses 2% of the world's energy supply. (Wow!) 50% of the nitrogen in humans is from the Haber process. (Wow!) That's why experts call it the "detonator" for our population explosion from 1.7B in 1900 to 7.8B today. (It’s not all good—we don’t yet have a closed-loop system so have environmental issues with excess nitrogen.)
3) Great 3min video from NYT that explains the concept of a “social media audit”. What % of your Twitter feed are white males? And what % are progressive? Coherent Pluralism is continued engagement in refining your sensemaking ecosystem—this 3min audit is a great start. (I’ve done it for the last 3+ years!)
4) This War of Mine is the first video game to be added to a recommended school reading list (in Poland). The game looks at war from the civilian perspective.
5) Yes, GPT-3 is really cool. Check out how this AI-generated dungeon invents a complex magic system, the underlying theory behind it, and applies it to life. But also, don’t forget to temper your expectations.
From Rhys’ archives:
JOBS / OPPORTUNITIES
Get $25,000 by proposing an actionable investing framework for climate change. Apply here by August 1.
Year-long online program from Long Now on the Future of Invention. For learners aged 17+
If you’re building a business based on community-ownership, work with Jesse Walden’s new Variant Fund. (Related: check out this beautiful 10-image explanation from Reddit on their new community ownership program.)
Laura Deming’s new cohort for longevity research.
New BeOnDeck Angel fellowship. Costs $5,000, 8-weeks, good crew.
Work at Georgetown’s Beeck Center as a Public Interest Technology Fellow. Great opportunity if you’re interested in GovTech.
EVENTS
Weekly Bento (recurring, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays).
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
Foresight Institute (recurring)
MUSIC
Nothing from me this week—I’d love to hear what you’ve been listening to! Send me something and I’ll combine them all into a playlist for next week. Thanks!
Thanks as always for reading. Please share this newsletter, support me on Patreon, or reply if you have feedback.
Hope you have a good week. Warmth, Rhys